Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known – Oscar Wilde

Dasein is being there – a being in a space. We ask about the being, but not the there, the space in which we find ourselves. Is it not part of our being? Does it not shape us? Is it not the part of the world we occupy until life ends. What do we know of it in existential terms? Why does metaphysics have nothing to say about it?

What and where is “there?” How do I find myself in a place? What does this occupancy entail and mean? I maintain that there is no revelation on these questions, no true understanding, until one becomes an Artist. Only Artists think space.

Certainly, the term Da-sein (as used by Heidegger in later writings) implies activity of human sort. What activity can be as significant and revealing as art? It cannot be compared to ontic activities which occupy us in our everydayness. All the birthing, learning, working, worrying and surviving. What value lies in any of it if beauty did not exist, and if we as Beings-in-the-World did not respond to it?

One’s response to beauty makes one what they are. It makes us Dasein or Being-in-the-World. In this sense Being-in-the-World can be equated with Being-Toward-Beauty. As such, the way is open for us to revision Metaphysics, Existentialism and Fundamental Ontology, etc, in Aesthetic terms, taking it for granted that Being and Beauty are synonymous. After all, what is more philosophical than the existence and contemplation of beauty?

Many commenters agree that there are definite aesthetic principles espoused by Heidegger, and that at the very least aesthetics is half-way to his Fundamental Ontology. Art, not science, is Dasein’s failsafe means of dealing with reality now that the props of religion have crumbled, and man wanders homelessly without familiar traditional compasses. In the modern age of uncertainty and despair, high Art provides purpose, inspiration and hope. Via Art man holds on to his world, sanity and Selfhood. He keeps open his image-making faculties and symbolic sensibility. Without these there can be no Self-image and no Self.